“Says yer ken go on to de store, he reckon.”
It was after ten o’clock when the traveller reached the next house. It stood close upon the road, and the voice of a woman answered a knock upon the door, and, in reply to the demand, said it was not far to the store, and she reckoned they accommodated travellers there.
Finally, at the store, the traveller succeeded in getting admittance, was comfortably lodged and well entertained by an amiable family. Their kindness was of such a character that he felt, in the position of an invited guest, unable to demand and unwilling to suggest any unvolunteered service. There was no indication that the house was an inn, yet the traveller’s experience left him little room to hesitate to offer money, nor was there the slightest hesitation on the part of the storekeeper in naming the amount due for the entertainment he had, or in taking it.
If the reader will accept the traveller’s judgment of himself, he will assume that there was nothing in his countenance, his dress, his language, or his bearing, by which he could readily be distinguished from a gentleman of Southern birth and education, and that he was not imagined to be anything else, certainly not on his first inquiry, at any one of the plantations where he was thus refused shelter.
So far as this inhospitality (for this is, I think, what even the Southern reader will be inclined to call it) needed explanation, it was supposed to be sufficiently given in the fact that the region had, by the recent construction of a railroad through it, approximated the condition of a well-settled and organized community, in which the movements of travellers are so systematized, that the business of providing for their wants, as a matter of pecuniary profit, can no longer be made a mere supplement of another business, but becomes a distinct occupation.
This, then, but a small part of the whole land being thus affected by railroads, was an exception in the South. True; but what is the rule to which this is the exception?
Mr. De Bow says, that the traveller would have had no apprehension that the offer of money for chance entertainment for the night furnished him at a house on the banks of the Connecticut, would give offence; yet in the Connecticut valley, among people having no servants, and not a tithe of the nominal wealth of the Red River planter, or of one of these Virginia planters, such has been a frequent experience of the same traveller. Nor has he ever, when calling benighted at a house, anywhere in the State of Connecticut, far from a public-house, escaped being invited with cordial frankness to enjoy such accommodation as it afforded; and this, he is fully convinced, without any thought in the majority of cases of pecuniary remuneration. In several instances a remuneration in money has been refused in a manner which conveyed a reproof of the offer of it as indelicate; and it thus happens that it was a common experience of that, of the possibility of which Mr. De Bow is unable to conceive, that led in no small degree to the hesitation upon which this very comment was made.
This simple faith in the meanness of the people of the North, and especially of New England, is no eccentricity of Mr. De Bow’s. It is in accordance with the general tone of literature and of conversation at the South, that penuriousness, disingenuousness, knavish cunning, cant, cowardice, and hypocrisy are assumed to be the prevailing traits by which they are distinguished from the people of the South—not the poor people of New England from the planters of the South, but the people generally from the people generally. Not the tone of the political literature and of the lower class of the South, but of its wealthy class, very generally, really of its “better class.” Mr. De Bow is himself the associate of gentlemen as well informed and as free from narrow prejudices as any at the South. No New England man, who has travelled at the South, would be surprised, indeed, if, at a table at which he were a guest, such an assumption as that of Mr. De Bow should be apparent in all the conversation, and that the gist of it should be supposed to be so well understood and generally conceded, that he could not be annoyed thereat.
I need hardly say that this reference to Mr. De Bow is continued, not for the purpose of vindicating the North any more than myself from a mistaken criticism. I wish only to demonstrate how necessary it must soon be to find other means for saving the Union than these commonplace flatteries of Southern conceit and apologies for Southern folly, to which we have not only become so accustomed ourselves, as to hardly believe our eyes when we are obliged to meet the facts (as was my own case), but by which we have so successfully imposed upon our friends, that a man like Mr. De Bow actually supposes that the common planters of the teeming and sunny South, are, as a rule, a more open-handed, liberal, and hospitable class than the hard-working farmers of the bleak and sterile hills of New England; so much so, that he feels warranted not merely in stating facts within his personal knowledge, illustrating the character of the latter and arguing the causes, but in incidentally referring to their penuriousness as a matter of proverbial contempt. Against this mistake, which, I doubt not, is accomplishing constant mischief to our nation, I merely oppose the facts of actual experience. I wish to do so with true respect for the good sense of the South.